African Borderland Sculpture

The preceding five articles were presented as a panel called "African Borderland Sculpture: Liminal Space in the Study of Style," which I organized for the February 1987 meetings of the College Art Association in Boston.My original call for papers will give an idea of what we had in mind: "Studies of African sculpture style are most fruitful when they include explorations of cultural change and artists' motivations.Politics, commerce, the stature of sculptors, and the relationships between sculptors and clients have all been shown to shape style, and a growing body of research demonstrates that it is no longer possible to view the shape of African art as dictated by hermetically sealed geographic, ethnic, or traditional boundaries.Proclamations of pristine tribal morphologies hold little interest for scholars who now view style as a fluid component in modes of expression that are dynamic and almost always synergistic."A most interesting space for the study of style occurs at the borders between ethnic groups and between the regional populations that compose them.These cutting edges harbor genres of sculpture that teach a great deal about style development and its relationship to a society's modes of thought.Current research is beginning to show that even our ideas about some ethnic groups' regional styles must now be revised.The goal of this panel is to strengthen our understanding of African sculpture styles by looking at their manifestations in these borderlands."Thus the panel intended to explore aspects of the ideas set forth originally in 1968, when Roy Sieber and Arnold Rubin published Sculpture of Black Africa: The Paul Tishman Collection.The message of those authors was deceptively simple and immensely influential.While telling us, innocently enough, that African art was more than the machinations of ethnicity, they destabilize several old notionslike those of the anonymous artist, of the blind following of conventions, and of a continent devoid of art history and full of art traditions too fragile to survive the West or Islam.Meanwhile, Warren d'Azevedo and Robert Farris Thompson were busy demonstrating the existence of sophisticated art forms that function as com-plex vehicles of contemplation and action in most realms of social enterprise.Insightfully early, in 1958, d'Azevedo had made it clear that the Gola applied refined aesthetic attitudes to their art and artists.Thompson (1968, 1973) then showed that the Yoruba also maintained refined aesthetic attitudes and put them to work in several important social and spiritual arenas.So it began to appear that aesthetic consciousness might be a rule rather than an exception in Africa.If that proved true, we might find artists and clients ready to use the manipulation of style as a resource in several expressive and symbolic arenas.Shortly thereafter Rene Bravmann published two works that dramatically expanded our understanding of style.His Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa (1974) was a landmark exploration of both African Islam and traditional sculptural forms that demonstrated just how flexible and dynamic both could be.His Open Frontiers (1973) took up the theme set forth by Sieber and Rubin and demonstrated its viability in no uncertain terms.He began by deploring the tired but tenacious notion that ethnic groups possess immutable ethnic styles.He then quoted Simon Ottenberg (1971), who had artfully equated the ideas of tribe and tribal style with a pronounced ethnocentric interest in cultural morphology that does not lead to fruitful understanding.Finally, Bravmann developed his position quite convincingly by examining the cultural, political, and economic histories of two areas.Indeed he made it clear that fluidity of style in the borderlands between ethnic groups was a vital and defining characteristic of African art.Thus in the space of five years, from Sculpture of Black Africa to Open Frontiers, the horizons for research opened up immensely for African-art historians.Recently Christopher Roy took another important step in the effort to understand the relationship between ethnicity and style.In Art and Life in Africa: Selections from the Stanley Collection (1985), he explores the phenomenon of style centers in Africa, where artists produce traditional works for several ethnic groups at the same time, sculpting eclectically in a variety of styles while contributing significantly to the history of style development in the areas to which